Scripting my online demise

When I created my first email ID back in 2000, dan_hercules@yahoo.com, I did not have much use for it. A few years later, tired of all the spam I was receiving, I switched to eihdee@rediffmail.com. That ID was put to much more frequent and meaningful use, as I was in college and away from the life I'd known till then. When Google launched their Gmail service in 2004, and I received the requisite invite, I signed up for ajcfreak@gmail.com. Since then, aJCfreak has been my online presence. The ID stems from a dc Talk song, Jesus Freak. I wanted to be a Jesus freak, and it kind of epitomised everything that I desired to be. So it was perfect. Almost.

Over the past 8-9 years, my online presence has grown to several locations and multiple avatars and IDs and such. It's something that I've become tied to. Who's ajcfreak? Yeah, that's me. In tying myself to this online ID, I seem to have tied my creative outputs to myself as well. For example, the scores of songs I've written (at my website) and this book I started writing all amount to MY work. Mine. Solely. Looking back, the "JC" part of aJCfreak seems to have diminished over time. I have started ventures and involved myself in online activities that are perfectly well-mannered and completely lawful, but may not exactly be what the Lord intended me to start or involve myself in.

It looked like I was really going somewhere - gaining the world, so to speak. However, Jesus asks in the Word what would profit a man if he gained the whole world, but lost his soul. This past weekend, 12th/13th Jan 2013, I felt the Lord asking me the same thing. "What profits you, Dan" I thought He said, "if you gain the whole online world but lost sight of what I want you to do specifically?" It was so monumentally staggering that the thought took couple of days to sink in. Here's some of the things that helped me along the way. During Sunday service, I felt Jesus saying "Would you leave everything and come after me?" similar to what He told people when He walked upon Earth - only, for me, it was everything online plus everything I've created so far. All my songs. All my writings. All my online accounts. Would I give them up and go after Him alone? Next, the Toby Mac song Lose My Soul says, "I don't wanna gain the whole world, yet lose my soul". This kept ringing in my head, and I took a closer look at the lyrics - which seem to completely (or atleast, 99%) mirror my current decision to give up everything and follow Him.

So what does this actually mean? It means that I've started scripting my online demise. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be taking almost all (if not all) of my existing accounts offline. I've begun with my least used accounts - Ustream, myspace, soundcloud, flickr, YouTube, Yahoo!, Qyuki and XDA Developers. I will continue the deletion of my online accounts. Whether I will end up deleting my current Facebook, Gmail and Google accounts remains to be seen. If I'm required to do that, it would be the hardest thing I've ever done - harder than quitting HP and this blog would also go bye-bye. I'm just waiting and praying and seeing.

Lastly, I just want to make it clear - there's nothing wrong with online accounts. There's nothing wrong with creativity, or the outputs from it. It's just that for me, personally, I had lost the Lord of the creativity amidst all the flurry of creativity. He's still the One pouring forth out of me, but I had lost the sense to see it, acknowledge it and be bound to that fact. I will definitely continue to exist online; just that it won't be in the same manner, and most probably not in the same avatars that the online world has seen till date.

Any thoughts/questions/clarifications/criticisms/comments/prayers are welcome, as always.

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